Wine barrels have been around for hundreds of years and have been carefully crafted so that wine makers can use them to age wine, with the wood of the barrel contributing to the flavor of the wine by allowing the wine to absorb certain flavoring and components from the wooden barrel. This technique has been raised to a very carefully crafted art form with a particular species of wood being selected for various wines. For example, American Oak and French Oak provide different flavorings and a wine maker may pick one or the other depending on his or her objective for that particular wine.
In addition, the insides of wine barrels typically are toasted which further enhances the flavor transfer to the wine.
Thus, in barrel aging of wine, not only is the wine stored in the barrel, but some of the characteristics of the barrel are conveyed to the wine. As a result, although barrels can be reused, those characteristics become depleted to the point of where the barrel can rarely be used more than two or three times before having to be discarded or consigned to a much lower value use. This causes economic waste because the wood that goes into fine wine barrels is expensive and it would be advantageous if a barrel could be designed to allow the wood to be used for considerably more than two or three wine batches.